How do I configure Thunderbird/Icedove to use May First/People Link email?

The first step in creating a Thunderbird account, is to provide your name and email address. If you are setting up your own email, use your name and address. If you want mail to appear to come from an organization as a whole, you can put only your organization's name instead of your own. Press "Continue" when you are done.

Next, you will want to immediately press "Manual Config":

IMAP or POP?

Next, you'll need to decide whether you want a POP account or an IMAP account. Thing to consider in making that choice are listed here. Using "POP" has the potential to reduce loads on the MayFirst email servers (if you deselect the option to "leave messages on server") when you download the emails to your own computer. With "IMAP", your emails are maintained on the server (until you delete them) so they remain accessible from any computer. If you need to access your emails using webmail or from multiple computers, you may want to configure your email client to use "IMAP" instead of "POP". If so, culling emails regularly will help reduce use of resources on the MayFirst email servers.

You should also look over the other settings and adjust them to meet your needs. Access them from the Tools menu -> Account Settings.

The composition settings are optional, but we highly recommend turning off HTML email, which will ensure that your mail is legible to more readers. We often find that the default reply settings are not to our liking, and you may want to change these as well.

Lastly, if you are using IMAP, we strongly encourage you to enable offline caching, ​as explained on ​webchick.net. That will make it much faster to read your email.